Your weekly signal from India’s music scene.

The Big Story

Three weeks ago Spotify said 40% of Indian royalties come from abroad. Chartmetric’s map shows where “abroad” actually is.

What happened:

Chartmetric published its global cross-border study on September 24, and India is its headline case. The number of Indian artists reaching Chartmetric’s “Superstar” tier went from 25 in 2021 to 37 in 2024, 154 in 2025 and 170 so far in 2026, more new superstars than any other country. Indian tracks’ entries on foreign Spotify regional charts rose from 1,593 in 2021 to a peak of 8,444 in 2024, easing to 7,736 last year. Five Indians sit in Chartmetric’s inaugural global Top 50 artists: Arijit Singh at 12, Alka Yagnik at 14, Shreya Ghoshal at 25, Udit Narayan at 26 and Pritam at 47. All five are Hindi film playback singers or composers. The qualifiers are the story. The primary report finds that Indian artists chart in only 24 foreign Spotify markets, against 46 for Nigeria, 42 for Brazil and 32 for Mexico, and that the growth is concentrated in Pakistan, the UAE, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. Luminate’s first-half data in the same piece puts Hindi film music at 33.5% of India’s streams, with more than 75% of those plays going to deep catalogue. No Indian song appears on Chartmetric’s top-tracks chart, which the report attributes partly to TikTok’s absence from India depressing the social signals its rankings weigh.

Why it matters: Put this beside the Spotify Loud & Clear figure from the September 7 issue and the two reports stop agreeing. Spotify says over 40% of Indian artists’ royalties are international; Chartmetric says that international footprint is 24 markets, nearly all of them places where South Asians already live. Both are true. The export story is real in revenue terms and narrow in geographic terms, and the narrowness is the planning input. The Gulf and Southeast Asia pay because the audience is there and already knows the repertoire. Europe and North America pay through Punjabi touring, which is a different product. And the global Top 50 being five Hindi film veterans while “superstars” multiply tells you the two things are decoupled: breadth is being built by I-pop, Haryanvi and regional acts, but the ranking engines still reward the catalogue machine.

We’re thinking: The 24-market figure is the one to work with. If your international streams come from Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Karachi, your touring, sync and language decisions should be built around those cities, not around a London or Toronto date that the Punjabi pipeline can sell and yours cannot yet. The TikTok point cuts the other way: Indian artists are structurally under-ranked by every global dashboard that weights social, which means international A&R using those dashboards will undercount you. Bring your own data to the meeting.

Releases

What happened: Karan Aujla released Aujla SZN 1 on September 25, a five-track EP on his own imprint with producers Ikky and Mxrci, after a one-day pop-up at Select CityWalk in Delhi on September 22 where fans saw the hand-painted artwork before its online reveal, with 200 T-shirts, 500 signed postcards and a book of handwritten lyrics; the lead single “Ashke” was Billboard India’s pick of the week. September 25 was the Tamil release day flagged last week. Anirudh Ravichander’s “One Sun One Moon” from Jailer 2 arrived on the day, Hiphop Tamizha’s Meesaya Murukku 2 opened through Saregama with mixed reviews but a theme of independent music being absorbed by corporate interests, and Karthik Subbaraj’s Dorothy, Ilaiyaraaja’s first collaboration with the director, released after a TIFF premiere, with the third single “Onna Thottu” out the day before. In Hindi, Zee Music’s The Vvaan soundtrack ran six composers, from Tanishk Bagchi and Vishal Mishra to Amit Trivedi and Sam C.S., and Lucky Ali sang Rochak Kohli’s “Muskura Do” for Drishyam: The Conclusion. Rolling Stone India’s column led with Parimal Shais flipping “Dola Re” into “Curry Chatti,” Rainburn’s “Confessions” from a concept album and Kunwarr’s “Hold Up,” and Mumbai producer proya’s debut ambient EP Subliminal drew a Wild City note that narrative ambient “is not a common achievement by budding artists of the genre.”

Why it matters: Aujla’s rollout is a release-marketing case study: a physical, scarcity-based, fan-first event in a mall, days before a streaming-first EP, with no label in the chain. It is the model K-pop built and the Chartmetric data above says the Punjabi audience will reward. The six-composer Vvaan album is the opposite instinct, the committee soundtrack, and it arrived with the unauthorised-use complaint from last issue unresolved.

We’re thinking: Meesaya Murukku 2’s plot, an independent artist swallowed by a corporate label, reviewed badly as a film and landed as a conversation anyway. That is a sign the audience understands the industry argument well enough to find a bad dramatisation of it boring. Make the actual case instead.

Live & Touring

What happened: Diljit Dosanjh’s Ahmedabad date got its paperwork: Narendra Modi Stadium on November 21, 132,000 capacity, co-produced by BookMyShow Live and Live Nation, RuPay presale on September 28 and general sale on October 1. Ziro Festival ran its 13th edition from September 24 to 27 in Arunachal Pradesh with more than 40 acts, from Sukhbir and Midival Punditz to Sri Lanka’s Yohani and residencies supported by Culture Ireland and Pro Helvetia; co-founder Bobby Hano said “discovery and cross-cultural exchanges remain central.” Bengaluru ran two festivals the same weekend: linear, a 24-hour programme along the metro’s Purple Line with punk, Baul and Yakshagana, and Higher Ground’s rock-leaning second edition with a stage for emerging acts. Yuvan Shankar Raja sold out a Chennai concert built entirely on his film background scores, telling Billboard India the day after that “someone in London, New York or Tokyo shouldn’t have to know films like 7G” to connect with it. The club week was dense: French Afro-house producer SOLTO in Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai, Ukrainian techno DJ Daria Kolosova at antiSOCIAL, Shriya Rao’s EP tour in Mumbai. And Assam’s concert-tourism push got a hospitality partner for Burpp Fest, with EVENTFAQS citing a projected ₹700 crore cumulative impact over five years from the state’s 2025 policy.

Why it matters: Live Nation co-producing a 132,000-seat show in Gujarat is the first time the world’s largest promoter has put its name on an Indian-language stadium headline at home rather than abroad. That is the Wembley data from two weeks ago being spent. The festival weekend is the other half of the picture: Ziro, linear and Higher Ground are all small, curated and regionally rooted, and all three ran without a headline sponsor’s logo in the name. Yuvan’s score-only concert is a format that did not exist in India before this year, and it sold out.

We’re thinking: If you compose for film, the Yuvan show is a template worth copying at any scale. Scores are the part of a composer’s catalogue the label does not market and the audience rarely hears outside the cinema. A seated concert of them is a product you own outright. For promoters watching Ahmedabad: the ₹999 floor tells you the audience Live Nation is pricing for, and it is not the one buying ₹14,999 seats.

Industry

What happened: Zee Live will turn Sa Re Ga Ma Pa and Kerala Underground into touring concert IP, chief business officer Gareth Eswin Thomas told All About Music: post-finale nights pairing top contestants with a mentor, and the Malayalam rap competition routed to Dubai, the UK and Southeast Asia’s Malayali diaspora with a headline rapper. Bunty Sajdeh’s talent agency Cornerstone launched a music vertical with Raja Kumari and Quake, covering management, song acquisition, IP and live, and said it will use AI-assisted tools to cut production costs for emerging artists. Spotify launched Haryanvi 101, a flagship playlist for a language whose listenership is up roughly sevenfold since February 2023; Hot Hits Haryanvi grew 29% year on year, Trending Now Haryanvi 58%, and Dhanda Nyoliwala had eight tracks on the 200-position India chart the prior week. Head of editorial Unni Nambudripad: “The audience for Haryanvi music was always there.” And Warner Music Group restructured its recorded-music leadership: Val Blavatnik joins as managing director for North America, the UK and corporate development, Alejandro Duque becomes president of Warner Music International with APAC added to his Latin America and EMEA remit, and Simon Robson exits in December after around 30 years.

Why it matters: The Zee Live move is the clearest statement yet that a TV broadcaster sees contestants as touring assets, and the Kerala Underground routing, to the Gulf and the UK rather than Kochi and Thrissur, is the Chartmetric map applied by a company that has read it. The Warner change matters for India through a single reporting line: Warner Music India now sits under Duque, the executive credited with building Warner’s US Latin share, whose brief names investment in fast-growing markets. Spotify’s Haryanvi playlist is the platform catching up to a chart it already reflects; Banjaare have had two Indian No. 1s this year.

We’re thinking: Cornerstone’s AI-to-cut-costs line, from an agency signing Raja Kumari, is worth reading next to Saregama’s no-AI rule from last week. The industry is splitting on where AI sits: forbidden in the creative product, encouraged in the production budget. That line is going to be contested in every deal for the next year. Ask which side of it your contract puts you on.

The Conversation

What happened: Two stories about whether the numbers mean what they say. Hypebot analysed YouTube’s August change to count a view at first frame rather than after 30 seconds: across 75,000 videos, only about 60% of new public views were “engaged,” so public counts are inflated roughly 1.67 times, with 77% of the gap coming from autoplay feeds. Royalties and Partner Program eligibility still use engaged views; marketers buying placements on public counts “are likely overpaying by up to 67%.” And Suno, responding to the Universal and Sony suit, confirmed its v6 models were trained on “content licensed from our partners, interactions including creations and preference signals from our community,” which is to say on what users made with earlier models. Suno called the suit “fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law.” Sony Music Group, the same week, became the first music company to join ARIAM, an AI policy coalition with Disney, the BBC and The New York Times.

Why it matters: Indian labels, promoters and brands price deals on YouTube public view counts more than any market on earth; a 100-million-view milestone is a press release here. Those milestones just got structurally easier, and the royalty line did not move. The Suno admission matters for a different reason: every Indian producer who uploaded their own ideas to sketch with v5 has now been told those sketches trained v6. “Licensed” described the partners’ catalogues, not the users’.

We’re thinking: Ask for engaged-view data in every YouTube-based negotiation from now on, and expect labels to resist, because the public number is the one they report. On Suno, the practical question is whether your terms of service click in 2025 was consent to train. Nobody in India has tested that, and the first artist who does will set the rule.

Craft & Tools

What happened: 8dio’s Soundpaint 5.0 added an in-app sample editor for building custom instruments, a 2,000-step arpeggiator, an improved legato engine and more than 130 world tunings, with the core player and around 15 instruments still free. Audio Damage released AD-202, a Roland MC-202 emulation for desktop and iOS. Two free synths arrived in the same week: mo0kid’s open-source Waldorf Wave emulation and Jas-i’s Khorlo, a rotating physical-modelling engine. IPRS held its Srinagar workshop and Fankar-E-Kashmir auditions on September 25 and 26, covering publishing, royalties and digital-platform strategy for Kashmiri artists.

Why it matters: Soundpaint’s tunings list is the useful detail. A free sampler that now builds instruments and ships with shruti-compatible tuning tables is a direct substitute for a Kontakt licence for anyone sampling folk or classical sources, and the sample editor removes the last reason to pay for the competitor. The free-synth pair is the pattern of the year: novel synthesis engines arriving at zero cost from individual developers, which suits a producer base that is mostly on laptops and phones.

We’re thinking: The IPRS Srinagar session is the quiet item worth the most. The society’s communications head called Kashmir “a virgin place for us,” which is an admission that a region producing some of the country’s most-streamed artists this year had no rights-collection presence. If you are a Kashmiri writer or composer, the registration is the point of the workshop; the workshop is not.

Global Ear

What happened: Apple opened Apple Music Hall at Battersea Power Station in London, a 600-seat venue with a 48-speaker spatial system, two studios and infrastructure for 16-plus broadcast cameras, built so a single show produces a Spatial Audio master, a broadcast mix and a multicam video. YouTube Music announced Ask Music, natural-language requests for playlists and new music, at its Made on YouTube event, with no rollout markets given. Oasis sold out all 42 dates of Live ‘27 across three days of registration-only windows with randomly selected codes, no general on-sale and no dynamic pricing. A September nor’easter cancelled Global Citizen Festival, All Things Go and Ed Sheeran’s two Gillette Stadium shows, the first Global Citizen cancellation in 14 years. And London’s Unit1 Studio raised $20 million led by Balderton to make avatar concerts tourable, after moving a KT Tunstall show between venues in four days.

Why it matters: London is the first European stop for most Indian artists who tour there at all, and Apple just built a room where one night yields a Spatial Audio live release. For a Prateek Kuhad or an Anoushka Shankar, that is a record and a broadcast from a date already on the itinerary. Ask Music is a metadata story: conversational search finds songs by mood, language and instrumentation, which rewards artists whose metadata is rich and penalises catalogue uploaded with a title and nothing else. The Oasis sale is the model Indian ticketing will be judged against. The weather cancellations are a line item: Indian festival season now overlaps with monsoon tails, and headliners’ teams are starting to ask about contingency clauses.

We’re thinking: Unit1’s portable avatar show is the technology that makes a Kishore Kumar or Lata Mangeshkar production plausible without an ABBA Voyage budget, and estates in India should be having that conversation now, before a label has it for them.

Quick Hits

  • Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” set the all-time Hot 100 record with a 23rd week at No. 1 on the chart dated September 26, passing Mariah Carey (RTTNews).
  • Spotify reports Q3 on October 22, the first full quarter of the India Premium-window experiment (Business Wire).
  • Carianne Marshall is leaving Warner Chappell, with Guy Moot sole chair from October 1 (MBW); the publisher has been among the most active signers of Indian writers.
  • Tinashe’s Popstar drew a 9.0 from Pitchfork and a 90 on Metacritic, the week’s critical consensus (Metacritic).
  • UMG’s DistroKid complaint discloses that more than half of one major DSP’s tracks over six months came from DistroKid alone (MBW).

Coming Up

  • Diljit’s Ahmedabad presale opens today, September 28, with general sale on October 1.
  • Jailer 2’s full album launches September 30 at a “Jailer 2 Rave” at Chennai Trade Centre, ahead of the October 15 release (Wikipedia).
  • Drishyam: The Conclusion opens October 2 with its four-track Sony album complete.
  • Opeth play Mumbai on October 3 and Bengaluru on October 4, their first Indian dates since 2019 (Rolling Stone India).
  • MAX UN-MUTE’s first cypher is in Bengaluru on October 3, with Reble, Asal Kolaar and Siyaahi.
  • The Grub Fest in Delhi and Casa Bacardi in Dehradun run October 3 and 4, per Rolling Stone India’s festival guide.

Sources linked inline throughout. Every factual claim carries one.